The Secret of Chanel No. 5 Read online

  THE SECRET OF

  CHANEL N° 5

  THE INTIMATE HISTORY OF THE

  WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS PERFUME

  TILAR J. MAZZEO

  FOR SUSANNE

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PREFACE

  PART I COCO BEFORE CHANEL NO. 5

  ONE AUBAZINE AND THE SECRET CODE OF SCENT

  TWO THE PRETTY PERFUMER

  THREE THE SOENT OF BETRAYAL

  FOUR AN EDUCATION IN THE SENSES

  FIVE THE PRINCE AND THE PERFUMER

  SIX THE BIRTH OF A MODERN LEGEND

  PART II LOVE AND WAR

  SEVEN LAUNCHING CHANEL NO. 5

  EIGHT THE SCENT WITH A REPUTATION

  NINE MARKETING MINIMALISM

  TEN CHANEL NO. 5 AND THE STYLE MODERNE

  ELEVEN HOLLYWOOD AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION

  TWELVE A BROKEN PARTNERSHIP

  THIRTEEN IN THE SHADOW OF THE RITZ

  FOURTEEN COCO AT WAR

  FIFTEEN COCO PLAYS THE NUMBERS

  PART III THE LIFE OF AN ICON

  SIXTEEN AN ICON OF THE 1950S

  SEVENTEEN THE ART OF BUSINESS

  EIGHTEEN THE END OF MODERN PERFUMERY

  AFTERWORD

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  ALSO BY TILAR J. MAZZEO

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PREFACE

  Headlines around the world in the first days of December 2009 boldly announced something that came as a surprise to few: “Chanel No. 5 rated ‘most seductive scent’ in poll of women.”1 Coco Chanel’s iconic fragrance had once again been tapped as the world’s sexiest perfume, handily beating out the designer perfumes of the contemporary fashion greats, including scents as ubiquitous and lovely as Calvin Klein’s Eternity or Estée Lauder’s Beautiful. Some of the world’s bestselling fragrances didn’t make the list at all. Among the fragrances ranked in the top twenty, there was something else remarkable, too: not one had a history that went back earlier than the 1980s–not one, that is, except for Chanel No. 5, now nearly ninety years old.

  Chanel No. 5 is one of the few remaining “legacy” perfumes, and the idea that Chanel No. 5 makes a woman irresistibly alluring isn’t a new one. When the story about the world’s most seductive fragrance ran in the pages of the London Daily Mail, the reporter drily observed that “Marilyn Monroe never had trouble attracting men”2 either. Now, “it appear[ed] her colourful love life may have been down to a simple choice3–her perfume.” After all, who could forget that the starlet famously quipped that all she wore to bed at night were a few drops of Chanel No. 54? Certainly not the thousands of women who voted to name it the most alluring fragrance on the market and declared it the perfect scent not just for getting a date but also “for getting beyond it to boyfriend status5.” In fact, among these women, an astonishing one in ten claimed they met Mr. Right while wearing the iconic perfume6.

  If that’s the case, Chanel No. 5 has to its credit a whole lot of love stories: according to the French government, a bottle of the world’s most famous perfume sells7 somewhere around the globe on the average of every thirty seconds, to the tune of $100 million a year. The precise figure, like so much about this celebrated fragrance, is a closely guarded company secret. But those numbers–which translate into something upward of a million bottles sold annually–mean just one thing: a vast number of beautifully scented women for someone to adore. And this has been happening year after year, for decades.

  Secrets, of course, give rise to legends, and both swirl around the story of Chanel No. 5. They have done so almost since Coco Chanel launched her signature perfume in the opening years of the 1920s–that pivotal moment after the first “Great War” when the world was determined to leave behind a painful past and to embrace all the promises of the new and the modern. Suddenly, once unimaginable things seemed possible. Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize for reimagining the laws of physics, and once deadly diseases were tamed by the miracle of vaccinations. At the beginning of that decade, America had just a handful of millionaires. A few years later, the ranks of the super rich had swelled by more than 700 percent8 to a number approaching fifteen thousand, ushering in what promised to be a new gilded age. The bustling postwar economies created a new standard of wealth and luxury, and, for the first time, it all seemed within reach of the average person. There were wireless radios and talkie films, cars for the middle classes and chic ready-made fashions–and fine French perfumes–on the floors of glittering department stores, another phenomenon of this enticing new commercial era9.

  This was the decade of New York and Paris and of all the things that happened at a moment when the distance between those two great cities was beginning to seem just a little bit shorter. It was the decade of superstars and heroes. And, as the rise of rapid communication created the beginnings of an international cosmopolitan culture, it also became the era of celebrity icons. Babe Ruth led the New York Yankees to three World Series titles10 in that roaring decade, and Charles Lindbergh flew thirty-three hours from New York to Paris. Clara Bow became the world’s first “It Girl"; Charlie Chaplin took Hollywood slapstick to dizzying heights; and on the nighttime stages in France’s capital, the sultry Josephine Baker danced topless to breathless applause, night after night, during the interwar years. Among all the icons of the 1920s, however, none could touch Coco Chanel, already acknowledged as one of the most chic and influential women of an entire generation.

  The line between legend and history, however, is wonderfully–and perplexingly–malleable. Much of what is told and retold as conventional wisdom about the spectacular rise of Chanel No. 5 and its transformation into an international byword for luxury is the stuff of half-truths, confusion, collective fantasy, and sheer invention. Sometimes, the truth that those legends obscure is more fantastic than any fiction.

  Consider all the things you think you know about Chanel No. 5, which for most of its history has been the bestselling fragrance of all time and among the twentieth century’s most coveted luxury objects. Perhaps you remember how this unique scent was invented in the summer of 1920 by the young fashion designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. Except it wasn’t. In fact, it was already a scent with a long and tangled history–a history about nothing so much as the intimacy of loss and desire.

  Perhaps you’ve read sources that tell how Chanel No. 5 stunned the world of traditional fragrance as a dazzling new technical innovation: history’s first synthetic composition, its first abstract scent, with its novel use of the perfume materials known as “aldehydes.” Indeed, it’s likely that you have because this claim is a key part of the legend of how Chanel No. 5 became a phenomenon. The trouble is that none of this is true, either. Chanel No. 5 wasn’t the first perfume to do any of those things. It wasn’t even the second. Poised on the brink of what is still known as the “golden age” of perfumery, Chanel No. 5 was a genuine revolution that changed the history of fragrance forever and one of the great works of a new kind of art in a vibrant modern era. What makes it spectacular, however, is something different–something that makes it enduringly and genuinely sexy.

  Among the widely held beliefs, there is one that is nearly universal: the idea that clever and persistent advertising created Chanel No. 5's international fame. Despite the beauty of a scent that perfume experts applaud as a milestone and masterpiece, who could doubt that its celebrity and staying power comes down to brilliant marketing and, especially, to the careful packaging of the scent in that wonderfully understated square-cut bottle? After all, the legend tells us how the bottle became re
vered, how it was recognized by Andy Warhol in his famous 1960s lithograph series as a twentieth-century icon. Then there is that spectacular photo shoot of Marilyn Monroe, the perfume’s greatest spokeswoman, holding the Chanel No. 5 bottle provocatively close to her ample cleavage.

  The trouble is that Chanel No. 5 was never one of the images in Warhol’s famous pop art icon series in the 1960s. No one paid Marilyn Monroe for any endorsement, either. Even the well-known story about how the bottle became part of the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the late 1950s is simply mistaken. Yet the idea that Chanel No. 5 is the creature of marketing is persistent because it seems so obvious. Look back through the archives, through the history of advertising and dusty copies of old newspapers and fashion magazines, however, and a simple and surprising fact emerges: Chanel No. 5's early success never came down to marketing at all.

  Despite the widespread popular conviction that clever advertising made Chanel No. 5 a great name in the world of luxury, the truth is something stranger and a story far more compelling and complicated: for the first forty years of its fame, the marketing was run-of-the-mill and largely uninspired. It should have been nothing short of disastrous. The biggest competitors for Chanel No. 5 in the 1920s, ‘30s, and even ‘40s were a competition and confusion of the company’s–and, later, Coco Chanel’s–own making. Somehow, the marketing and promotion just didn’t matter.

  Consider again that one simple fact: a bottle every thirty seconds. The numbers are staggering, and they aren’t part of a recent trend, either. Chanel No. 5 has been this kind of runaway success since the 1920s. As New York Times perfume critic Chandler Burr reminds us, in the fragrance industry today, the scent, which still dominates the global market, is spoken of in reverent tones simply as le monstre–the monster.11

  More than that, although it wasn’t among Warhol’s icons in the 1960s, Chanel No. 5 is one of those astonishingly rare products that has taken on a life of its own and breathes meaning as a symbol. It is an icon. As an exasperated competitor once anonymously confessed to Burr, “It’s unbelievable! It’s not a fragrance; it’s a goddamn cultural monument, like Coke.”12 The best metaphor, however, is still the one of the beautiful monstre, because this thing has a life of its own.

  Few products around the world are more beloved than Chanel No. 5, and it inspires in its millions of fans–and there are millions–the kind of passion and loyalty that executives in slick advertising offices on Madison Avenue can only dream about manufacturing. The dilemma for any curious historian, savvy entrepreneur, or fragrance aficionado is: what, precisely, is the connection? How did Chanel No. 5 become one of the most celebrated luxury products of all time? If it took decades for the marketing to catch up with the success of the world’s most famous perfume, what is the secret of its fabulous destiny? More simply still, why is Chanel No. 5 the most sensual perfume in the world, and what exactly is it that makes this scent so sexy? This book–the unauthorized biography of a scent–separates the fact from the fiction, and teases out the truths from the jumble of half-truths and revealing silences, to tell the story of a familiar cultural monument whose history we’ve never really known.

  In some ways, this is an unconventional book. After all, where, exactly, does one begin the story of a product, a consumable item? Does it start with the product’s creation? Does it start with its first success? With the moment when the idea was planted in the mind of its creator? Despite being one of the twentieth century’s iconic luxury products, sold around the world to millions of loyal enthusiasts, throughout the history of Chanel No. 5 there is one thing that has remained unchanged: behind all the risks and struggles and triumphs that have created this product there are profoundly intimate stories. From the private losses that led Coco Chanel to imagine a signature fragrance to the heady days of its spectacular success; from the decades of tense courtroom dramas that ultimately led her to try to sabotage her creation to the bitter private war waged with partners under the laws of Nazi-occupied France and in the industrial factories of Hoboken, New Jersey; from a moment of glorious postwar fame to the present day, when the perfume maintains its extraordinary allure despite all the odds, The Secret of Chanel No. 5 is the story of how a beloved product can have its own life.

  This is the history of the world’s most seductive scent, the pursuit of the fragrance industry’s glorious monstre–an intimate look into the secret life of a perfume that is about nothing so much as the production of desire. That story can only begin with the product’s beautiful, but deeply flawed, creator–a woman whose fabled life becomes more complex and fascinating when viewed through the lens of one of her most famous creations.

  PART I

  COCO BEFORE CHANEL NO. 5

  ONE

  AUBAZINE AND THE SECRET CODE OF SCENT

  For the better part of a century, the scent of Chanel No. 5 has been a sultry whisper that says we are in the presence of something rich and sensuous. It’s the quiet rustle of elegant self-indulgence, the scent of a world that is splendidly and beautifully opulent. And, at nearly four hundred dollars an ounce1, it’s no wonder that Chanel No. 5 suggests nothing in our minds so much as the idea of luxury.

  It’s a powerful association. Chanel No. 5 is sumptuous. In fact, the story of this famous scent is the tale of how a singular perfume captured precisely the fast-living and carefree spirit of the young and the rich in the Roaring Twenties–and of how it went on to capture the world’s imagination and desires. Chanel No. 5, from the moment of its first great heyday, was the scent of beautiful extravagance.

  The origins of the perfume and its creator, however, could not have been more different from all of this. Indeed, part of the complexity of telling Chanel No. 5's history is the great divide between how we think of this iconic perfume and the place where it began. Chanel No. 5 calls to mind all that is rich and lovely. It’s surprising to think that it started in a place that was the antithesis of what would later come to define it. The truth is that the fragrance that epitomizes all those worldly pleasures began with miserable impoverishment and amid the most staggering kinds of losses.

  Gabrielle Chanel’s peasant roots2 went deep into the earth of provincial southwestern France, and, in 1895, her mother, Jeanne Chanel–worn out by work and childbirth–succumbed to the tuberculosis that had slowly destroyed her. The disease spread quickly in the wet and cold conditions of the rural provinces, and in the nineteenth century it was called “consumption” for a reason. It ate away at the health of its victims from the inside, corrupting the lungs hopelessly and painfully. Gabrielle–named after the nun who delivered her–and her four surviving brothers and sisters had watched it all. She was just twelve years old at the time of her mother’s death.

  Her father, Albert, was an itinerant peddler, and perhaps he simply had no idea how to care for five young children. Perhaps he didn’t particularly care. He had about him a rakish charm and a lifelong knack for dodging responsibility. Whatever the case, in the span of only a few weeks, the young Gabrielle would also lose her second parent. The boys were sent out to work and to make their way in the world as best they could. Albert loaded his three daughters into a wagon without explanation and abandoned them at an orphanage in a rural hillside town in the Corrèze, at a convent abbey known as Aubazine.

  It was here that the girl who would become known around the world simply as Coco grew up as a charity-case orphan. It was a profound desertion, and the wounds of loss and abandonment were themes that would become as entwined in the story of Chanel No. 5 as they were in Coco’s. They formed an emotional register that would shape the history of the world’s most famous perfume and Coco Chanel’s often complicated relationship to it.

  Today, the abbey at Aubazine remains much as it was during her hard and lonely girlhood. Indeed, it remains much as it was during the twelfth century, when the saint Étienne d’Obazine3–as his name was rendered in the original Latin–founded it. During their time at the orphanage, Coco Chanel and
the other girls were assigned to read and reread the story of his exemplary life, and the unrelenting dullness of his good deeds is crushing.

  The saintly Étienne, however, had a keen sense of aesthetics at a moment when Western culture’s ideas about beauty and proportion were in radical transition. He and the monks who followed him to this wilderness in a remote corner of southwestern France were members of the new and rapidly growing Cistercian clerical order, which prized nothing so much as a life and an art of elemental simplicity. Étienne’s isolated retreat from the world at Aubazine was–and remains–a space of echoing austere grandeur.

  The road from the valley that winds up to Aubazine is steep and narrow, and the forests slant down sharply into long ravines. At the summit, there is nothing more than a small village, with a cluster of low stone buildings, a few shops, and quiet houses overshadowed by the looming presence of one of France’s great medieval abbeys. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had been transformed from a monastery into a convent orphanage for girls. For the children who lived there, it was a youth of hard work and strict discipline and, fortunately for the future prospects of the young Gabrielle, much of it focused on clothing. There was nothing luxurious about it, however. Days were spent washing laundry and mending, and it was here that she learned, of course, to sew.

  Coco Chanel once later said that fashion was architecture4, and the architecture she meant was based on this convent home, with its brutally clean lines and the stark beauty of simple contrasts. The connection has never been fully explored in any of the books that have been written on Coco Chanel’s revolutionary fashions. Perhaps the first person to recognize Aubazine’s profound importance was Coco Chanel’s biographer, Edmonde Charles-Roux, who was one of the few people to know the story of this lonely childhood. She mentions it in passing. Thinking of Aubazine and Gabrielle’s longing for a certain kind of starkness, Charles-Roux always believed that5: